The use of mobile phones to conduct financial transactions is growing in popularity. Various means of using mobile phones to conduct financial transactions have been tried. The most common involves sending a payment to a payee using the payee's cellular phone number as an identifier. This approach gives rise certain difficulties, however. First, the payee must have a cellular phone which is capable of receiving the payments. Second, the payer must know the payee's phone number. As cellular phone numbers tend to change frequently, a payer must make certain that the phone number being used is current. Otherwise, the payer runs the risk of sending a payment to an unintended third party, who has been assigned the intended payee's old phone number. Further, in some cases, the payee and payee may not wish to reveal personal information such as their cellular phone numbers to each other. Accordingly, there is a need for a new method of conducting financial transactions using phones.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other problems.